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Facial Expressions

As a minute or two in front of a mirror will demonstrate, the mouth is capable of being stretched, squeezed, or curled into just about any shape. Obviously, it requires quite a muscular network to allow us to do all those funny things with the mouth. There are twelve muscles in the network, but we can eliminate five right away as having nothing to do with facial expression (several are used, for example, mainly for eating). Of the seven remaining muscles, one is already familiar zygomatic...

The eye is both the most important feature and the most difficult one to draw. Students fuss over the rendering of the eye in their drawings, and they're right a poorly drawn eye will make an otherwise tolerable portrait look amateurish. Why does the eye present such a challenge Part of the problem is psychological. We are so engrossed in our preconceptions of the eye that we tend to draw from an idea rather than what we actually see. We conceive of the eye as important, so we draw it too large...

The skull determines the big picture the features control the nuances. I've started with the skull to emphasize the importance of having the right framework before you start to work up the details. Get the relationships of one part of the head to another right, and you have a solid foundation for your rendering. The rest of this book looks at the features and the muscles that act on them. In this section, I start by discussing the fundamentals the underlying construction and primary forms of...

Mouth olone appears neutral action of zygomatic minor may be present but is so slight as to be debatable. Her brows right make the rest of her face look sad. Emphasizing details the platform under the lips, darkness under the eyes suggest activity in otherwise neutral features. Mouth alone below appears neutral dark platform beneath suggests pout. Faint, horizontal middle-brow folds A . Dimple appears where corrugator attaches to skin kink in brow begins at that point B . Slight change in value...

DISTRESS INNER BROW END SLANTS UPWARD STRAIGHT-ACROSS TYPE HIGH-ARCHED TYPE The inner end of the eyebrow can be very expressive emotionally. If it drops down below a certain point see p. 66 , it indicates one sort of emotional state. If it moves above a certain point, it indicates distress. What separates these is the relationship of the inner third of the brow to the outer two-thirds. Ordinarily, the inner third lies either level with or below the rest of the eyebrow. If it moves even slightly...

Version 2 Lips stretched lower lip stretched sideways, not downward. Squared-off look to mouth shape. The face of a furious four-year-old. Both risoriusplatysma and lip depressor muscles are active, but neither is fully contracted. Mouth takes compromise position note dip downward in lower corner A , shown nicely in cartoon mouth at B . Same expression even simpler square mouth. Outer curve of the eye-line, rising as high as it does 2 , cleverly suggests and exaggerates effect of raised,...

Eyebrows with kink in inner third. B. Oblique across-the-lid fold. C Floating crease of zygomatic minor. D. Compression of orbicularis oris thins upper lip, bulges out lower. F. Mouth widened by risoriusplatysma. G. Signature wrinkle of triangularis. These two men are expressing their sadness quite differently. The sadness in the face of the man on the left is quite subtle. Just enough of the grief pattern is visible in his eyebrows and eyes to suggest his distress depending on how you see...

Dr. Duchenne of Bologna, a nineteenth-century French scientist, became famous for his explorations of muscle function using electrical stimulation. In his book Mecanisme de la physionomie humaine, he illustrated the actions of many of the facial muscles by photographing subjects whose faces he stimulated with electrified needles it's said to be a very unpleasant feeling . Here Duchenne demonstrates the action of the zygomatic major, touching the ends of the...

Sadness Ax d the Art of Portraiture_ Because the expression of sadness can be so slight, it crosses that imaginary line that separates expressions of crises and extremity from those that seem more commonplace, more part of a long-term mood. Sadness would not seem out of place in a formal portrait the way fear or surprise might. It would certainly have a compelling effect. Part of the fascination of a portrait is our interest in drawing conclusions from the face about personality of the sitter....

The drawings on these two pages seem like a sequence with the last picture missing the one where she bursts into tears. Unlike the neutral face above, we tend to see the face with so much activity opposite as leading up to something. In the final stage, the weeping face, the eyes will tightly shut. Sad eyes look out at the world through partly shuttered lids. The orbicularis oculi is partially contracted, creating crow's feet, raised lower lids compare sad iris shape with that of relaxed eye...

When only the eyelid portion of orbicularis oculi contracts, the main effect is to narrow the eye opening. The difference in appearance compared to simply closing the eye has to do with the lower lid. It straightens, rises up the eye, and covers the iris almost up to lower edge of pupil. This is how eyes look in first stage of a smile. There's also a little extra bulge below eyes A this is better defined when more of orbicularis oculi contracts.

When we look up, the eye reshapes itself in large and small ways to accommodate the movement. Even the obvious lifting of the iris has a subtle aspect the foreshortening of the iris into an ellipse. The first stage of the upward gaze B is the most difficult to capture. Great care must be taken to get the angle of the upper lid right, and to raise the iris high in relation to the inner eye corner. Note how in drawings A D, the iris is cut by the upper lid line in the same place no matter how it...

Romance seems to be the furthest thing from the mind of the young woman in this poster for a movie about adolescent love. Though the young man shows the proper readiness for a tender kiss, her face seems to be registering disgust. Kissing is normally an action that makes very few demands on the facial muscles. We close our eyes, open our mouths, and make contact. The problem here is that there are no less than three separate cues that her sneering muscles are active. It's safe to assume that...

As the head turns, the body of the aw appears to shorten. On the far side of the face, the foreshortened body B appears to go in almost the same direction as the vertical ramus C . A slight change in direction is maintained, and the chin appears almost flat. In profile, the aw appears as a bent L-shape, consisting of the almost vertical ramus D and the almost horizontal body. The back edge of the ramus points at the front of the ear. The chin has an in-and-out shape because of the canine fossa...

Considering how much can be expressed by the eyes and brow, it is surprising that there are only five muscles responsible for it all two under the forehead and brow, and three surrounding the eye. Our control over these muscles is so fine-tuned that we can express virtually the whole range of emotions with just a little twist here, a little lift there our perception is so practiced that we can instantly recognize the differences. The frontalis lifts the eyebrows straight up the forehead,...

Depicting the sidelong glance presents few technical problems for the artist. These illustrations demonstrate, though, that more changes in the eye than simply the iris moving to the side. The shape of the eye itself alters depending on the iris position. The rule is that the high point of the arch of the upper lid is always above the iris it's lifted by the cornea . The lower lid, however, changes very little as the iris shifts. The net effect of the modifications is that the eye alters in...

One way to find out if the eye is looking slightly up or down is to compare the iris' position to the level of the inner eye corner line . In a level gaze, the line indicated will cross the lower part of the iris looking down, the middle of the iris crosses the line looking up, the iris' lower part rises past the line. The angle of the upper lid has a great effect on the way we perceive the eye. It's a key element in telling the extra-wide eye from the neutral eye more important than the white...

If the corrugator makes us human, the levator labii superioris, the sneering muscle, is the muscle that makes us obnoxious. If there was a popularity contest for facial muscles, this one would lose, hands down there's no elegant or flattering or nice way to use this muscle. We tend to use it when we think something stinks, literally. Or when we're furious. Or when we're crying our hearts out. What the levator labii superioris does in particular is to lift the upper lip in a sneer. The lip...

It's hard to say too much about the eye when it comes to the nose, people lose interest a little more quickly. In fact, this lack of excitement over the nose is carried to an extreme in fashion illustration. It's not unusual for fashion illustrators to omit the nose entirely, leaving the more fashionable mouth and eyes to carry on without it. Even when included, the fashion nose is often little more than a flick of the brush. I won't argue that the nose is of much account in facial expression....

The eyes and brow together are easily the most magnetic and compelling part of the face. There seems to be something almost magically responsive and alive in the organ of vision. We instinctively feel that the eyes provide our most direct link to the person within. The brows too seem to have a life of their own. We can be responsive to the subtlest of shifts in the eyes and brow, measurable in mere fractions of an inch. For example, if you're talking to someone and his or her eyes shift past...

Charlesy Pve had it with you and your goddam gt moods Charlesy Pve had it with you and your goddam gt moods There is no landscape that we know as well as the human face. The twenty-five-odd square inches containing the features is the most intimately scrutinized piece of territory in existence, examined constantly, and carefully, with far more than an intellectual interest. Every detail of the nose, eyes, and mouth, every regularity in proportion, every variation from one individual to the...

M MM ' gt ' We don't need a lot of detail to read the expression in the gunman's eyes. They seem to glow out of the television fuzz, making even more sinister a sinister scene. Instinctively, we are reading the negative shapes of the eye whites as the signal of menace. The high contrast of the whites to the dark center of the eyes, and to the dark eyelid margin, allows the expressive shapes to communicate even at a distance. SHAPE ALONE INDICATES WIDENED EYE, LOWERED BROW, STRAIGHT LOWER LID....

The skull is the most important of the deep forms that give shape to the face. Differences between one person and another are largely a result of differences in the skull. The skull determines the shape of our head and the location of our features. Hallowe'en and horror films aside, it is a beautiful and fascinating structure. Part of an artist's training is to carefully observe and draw the skull from a variety of angles a plastic skull can be used . Eventually, the skull's basic framework is...

These two faces below and right both demonstrate the expression of surprise, but they are poles apart in every other respect. The photograph below , with its mechanical recording of detail, exemplifies the literal, un-selective approach. By contrast, the shell face right has only those details that are essential to identify the expression of surprise. These essential details form the code for the expression an O-shaped mouth and widened eyes. Both elements of the code must be present for...

The incisivis originates on jawbones above and below the lip A and attaches to mouth corners B . Basic action is simple All sections act together, pulling mouth corners toward each other. There is a muscular knot at the mouth corner thick enough to see and to feel. You can see it in three-quarter views, where it always makes a subtle extra curve at the level of the mouth C . The knot is the group attachment of zygomatic major D , triangularis E , risorius F , and...

For some reason people are mortally afraid of the subject of perspective in a way they never are of anatomy or proportion, both equally technical. It's all how you approach it. Perspective is basically the science of how point of view affects the way we see the physical world. Point of view affects the way the mouth looks in two main respects 1. The curve of the line between the lips is straight when the mouth is on our eye level, an upward arc when the head is tipped up, a downward one when...

There are only two differences between these two drawings the openness of the eyes and the separation of the irises. The face on the left, with more open eyes and irises centered in the eye, seems more outward looking. The face on the right, with eyes slightly more closed and irises slightly more separated, seems much more detached. We speak of someone with this look as gazing inward, or, less kindly, of being spaced out. This wall-eyed gentleman may not have been as wall-eyed as he looks. The...

Looked at closely, no two wrinkles are alike. They differ in shape, in length, in spacing, and in depth. If drawn in even rows, they look off living form is never mechanically repetitive. Wrinkles are clearest in areas of transition between light and dark A . In lightest areas, wrinkles, unless they are very deep, will show up only faintly B . In shadows, wrinkles, unless very deep, will fade into the general gloom C . A pen-and-ink version of the same face. In this medium, achieving soft...

There's one major difference between the mouth and the other features we've looked at. The nose and the eyes are built around a solid, fixed element anchored in place to the skull. The mouth, however, has no fixed attachment whatsoever. This, combined with the fact that there are a host of muscles specifically aimed at stretching and moving the mouth around, makes the mouth the most variable feature in the face. Learning it in repose is one thing learning it in action is another. Most people...

Almost all of our adult facial expressions have their roots in our very first expression the scream we made when we first emerged into this world. The facial expression of sadness is, of course, the most directly related to our original cry but certain elements of the baby's scream also appear in the expression of anger, disgust, and fear. Even laughter and joy include certain muscle contractions that we first experience in crying. The various forms of sadness weeping, dry-eyed grief, mild...

Carefully observing the way the mouth looks when relaxed and open will help us see more clearly the way its shape changes when we're happy, angry, or sad. The oval shape of the opening is the key. In most expressions it squares off dramatically in none except surprise is it oval. Note that as mouth drops, lower lip stretches more than upper, as it follows dropping teeth. Think of the upper lip as divided in thirds. The center third, with dip and peaks, is held in place by teeth. The outer legs...

Much is expressed in the face of this sad little girl, but little is actually visible. Sadness can be a powerful presence, even when the signs are so subtle. Surprisingly, the eyes in isolation bottom are not sad but appear sad beneath the kinked brow top . Little creasing is visible on so young a face, but soft darkening at A and B is spot where frown lines will probably appear when she's older darkening at C and D is beginning of worry lines. In the pout, center section of upper lip and LBL...

The mentalis is a companion to most of the faces of grief. When someone cries, the mentalis frequently acts with the mouth-stretcher, risoriusplatysma. The chin-raising muscle alternately contracts and relaxes, bowing up the center of the lower lip and wrinkling the chin when it contracts top . On either side of the raised part, the stretched lower lip goes back to being straight. The contraction of the mentalis seems to appear almost every time we're sad, whether we're crying or not. Fifteen...

The eyeball is one of the more nearly spherical forms in nature. Its roundness shapes the surfaces surrounding it, especially the lids. An awareness of this helps give a sense of solidity to renderings of the eye. And the more solid feeling the eye, the more lifelike, the more expressive. Imagining the eye as a ball with thick, visorlike lids produces a drawing bearing close resemblance to the living eye as well as a medieval helmet . The light is visualized as falling from upper left, throwing...

Sadness is the only expression in which the zygomatic minor A appears. Like the other two branches of the sneering muscle, it thickens the upper lip middle and below unlike them it does nothing to the nose. Its most characteristic sign is the floating wrinkle B . In the most intense action the cheeks begin to swell, a side effect of the full contraction of the orbicularis oculi around the eye. Three interacting forces stretch and compress the mouth. The strongest action is that of the risorius...

LBL has nearly doubled in length, extending well past the end of the red portion, but the lips are only slightly changed, stretching a bit at the end. LBL has pivoted down from A . Row of curved bulges, like waves approaching a shoreline, appear below mouth corner B . These are the signature wrinkles of the triangularis. The lowermost portion of the nasolabial fold deepens. The skin outside the fold is bulged out and pulled down, looking like a broad, rounded hook on the rim of the face C . Is...

The area below the nose is always marked with three strong divisions, like folds in a curtain. The folds are draped over the curving, forward-tilted form of the upper aw beneath. The curtain ends where it joins the cheeks, a border often marked by a crease. The three folds line up exactly with the three parts of the base of the nose and the three sections of the upper lip this is due to the common origin of all these forms in three tiny subdivisions in the embryo. A. Almost invisible on a...

The crying mouth is much wider than a relaxed mouth because of the sideways pull of risoriusplatysma. It's rectangular in shape because of the upward pull on upper lip and sideways pull on lower. It's rimmed by stretched, thinned lips with sharp highlights and smoothed surfaces. It's more rounded in skin area above lips note shadows on right and framed by raised cheeks and vertical folds from nose to chin. Both the crying and laughing mouths are widened with thinned, taut lips the upper lip is...

Sadness lends itself well to understatement, and understatement works well in portraiture. This portrait by Hilary Holmes has no pout, no signature wrinkles, and only one feature that is not neutral the two, slightly bent eyebrows. The artist said he perceived an expression of noble melancholy after the sitter lost a close friend. In Caravaggio's interpretation, the response of Christ to his betrayal is sadness. His passive acceptance of his arrest and downward gaze lead us to see resignation...

The mentalis lifts the skin over the chin. This direct action is not expressive, but the indirect action, the pushing together of the lips, is. We employ the mentalis to squash and pout our lips whenever we're sad and often when we're nervous or angry. It plays a role in the stifled smile and the facial shrug. Here its movement is isolated. In expression, it always acts in concert with other muscles. The signature wrinkle the puckered chin is always present, no matter what the expression. The...

The face of a bawling baby is the focal point for Rembrandt's Ganymede, capturing the moment when the child-god is snatched off to Olympus by Zeus in the form of an eagle. Curiously, the expression is more vivid in the sketch below . The dark, scrawled lines around the eyes quick notations of the wrinkling of orbicularis oculi and corrugator and the more open mouth with front teeth bared suggest a much stronger action than that visible in the painting. Nothing is more difficult than retaining...

Was it she, or was it her portrait painter A most peculiar-looking effect occurs when the eyes fall higher than halfway up the head. The woman might have looked this way, but a far more likely explanation is that the artist an early American painter inadvertently left out part of her forehead. Taking a bit off the top is the most common of all errors in portraiture. head makes a sharp break with the upper plane it's just slightly below the actual top. From here the skull is...

The orbicularis oris may also contract with the mouth open. Either lip may tighten without the other, as in the speaking mouth A , where only the upper lip is tensed. Another action of orbicularis oris is pursing the lips. This is the work of specialized fibers called incisivis that pull the mouth corners together, shortening the lips and pushing them outward. The lips pushed out from the face create a sharp shadow below A .

The relationship of emotion and the face is fascinating and complex. Three questions are worth examining before we look at the specific expressions What are the main facial expressions How universal are they How much can we really tell from the face Psychologists and anthropologists have had much to say of interest to artists on all these subjects. I have shown a lot of pictures of the face to people in the course of writing this book. I wanted to find out if there were certain expressions, of...

When the risoriusplatysma contract, the mouth corners are drawn sideways. The action has much more effect on the lower lip than the upper. The pull is primarily at lower lip level. The lower lip is stretched into a taut, even band, with straight-line upper and lower edges. The lip becomes slightly more recessed and as a result is surrounded with a soft fold, stretched between mouth corners the signature wrinkle. The entire front row of lower teeth are bared. In...

The action of the zygomatic minor is involuntary it appears only when we're sad, not otherwise the other two branches of the sneering muscle are under our conscious control . When it contracts, pulling from B , it creates its own signature wrinkle, the little floating crease in the middle of the cheek A . This crease marks the insertion of the muscle into the skin. The zygomatic minor also squares off the lip which is also stretched by the risorius and pushed up by the mentalis here and bunches...

Although the skull is what makes our heads different, all skulls are basically the same. We think that because everyone looks so different, the differences between one person and the next must be quite pronounced. But we're experts we've been looking at faces every day of our lives. If you've ever watched an expert in another field at work say, a geologist examining a rock, or a palm reader looking at a hand you know how much more they see in what they're examining than we do. Their long...

Curiously, there have been very few books on the subject of facial expression for the artist. To my knowledge, the last one was Sir Charles Bell's Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, published in 1806, and it wasn't a terribly good book in the first place. Many more recent drawing books have included short sections on expression without shedding much useful light on the matter. In fact, artists familiar with such sources have generally had the good sense to prefer their own...

The risoriusplatysma is a muscle of extreme circumstances. The act of stretching the lower lip creating the square mouth is not one we do casually or conversationally, like lowering the brows. When the lower lip The risorius A inserts into the muscular knot of the corner of the mouth at the same location as zygomatic major and triangularis. It originates on a connective layer over the upright leg of the jaw. When it contracts, it pulls the mouth corner straight backward. The platysma B is a...

Seen from the side, the iris widens from a narrow black oval, when we are looking straight ahead A , to an ellipse, when we are looking somewhat to the side B . The amount of space between the iris and the eye corner steadily decreases. When the glance is directly to the side C , the iris fills our view of the eye. Its shape appears more circular, and white space has appeared on its far side. It's also widened the eye corner slightly D . The rim of the upper lid bulges above the iris A and B...

When crying fades, the muscles of a sad face gradually relax. First to go is the mouth-stretching risoriusplatysma, then the eye-squeezing orbicularis oculi. As the latter goes slack, the cheeks lose their fullness and the lower lid its tension. What lingers is the pout and the grieving brow. Eventually, even the pout relaxes, leaving the twisted eyebrow as the only sign of the last stage of grief. The sad faces on this page have unhappy-looking brows and strong pouts. Though her pout is quite...

THE EYE WHAT MAKES THE EYES LOOK INTENSE The expression of anger revolves around the eyes. The eyes widen in anger, and the wider they open, the angrier we look. What complicates matters slightly is the effect of the brow on the widened eye. Once the artist learns to account for this, great control over the expression of anger follows. 1. Neutral. A man's eyes, with heavy eyebrows quite close to the top of the upper lid. 2. Brow down. Simple contraction of corrugator, pulling the...

Chin seems larger because of moving up of lips. Under-the-lip crease disappears. The first stage of a smile is the most elusive. We notice when the zygomatic major so much as twitches in the drawing of a weak contraction top left it's contracting a bit more than the minimum. The corner of the mouth is the first thing to change, rising above its neutral point A . The corner does not move by much before the cheeks swell and dimples appear it doesn't change by much before the whole LBL begins...

EMOTION AND THE FACE 126 THE EXPRESSION OF SADNESS 132 THE EXPRESSION OF ANGER 160 THE EXPRESSION OF JOY 188 THE EXPRESSION OF FEAR 238 THE EXPRESSION OF DISGUST 254 THE EXPRESSION OF SURPRISE 262 CONCLUSION 268 EXPRESSIONS IN BRIEF 270 EXPRESSIONS OF PHYSICAL STATES 281 INDEX 286 CREDITS AND REFERENCES 288

Originates on zygomatic arch inserts into mouth corner. Pulls mouth into smile known as the smiling muscle. 5. Risorius platysma. Ris-orius originates over rear of jaw, inserts into mouth corner platysma originates on upper chest, inserts into mouth corner. Both act together, stretching mouth, as in crying. Known as the lip stretcher. The platysma is not pictured here, as it would cover other muscles. 6. Frontalis. Originates near top of skull, along hairline inserts in skin...

People with arched upper lips form an important minority group, like left-handers. The arch may be fairly high A or lower, with only a tiny gap between the lips. The center part is never more than one-third the length of the upper lip, and side angles are not steep. The lower lip line is flat. The sneer occurs when the center is elongated and side angles are steep B . The lower lip is unaffected. If the pull of the sneering muscle, levator labii superioris, is...

The eyeball is set into a ring of bone, the orbit. What makes every eye unique is the particular way three forms bony rim, eyeball, and underlying fat assert themselves. The inner eye corner is a U-shaped pit where the two lids join A . It does not sit on the ball but starts where the ball ends. On Asiatic eyes this corner is hidden by a skin fold. The eyeball rests on a pad of fat the less full the pad, the deeper set the eye. A pouch often forms above the outer corner of the eye B , softening...

The folds that develop around the mouth are some of the deepest on the face. Here's the mark of forty years on a woman's face the particular pattern shown here seems to be more common with women than men. Though the wrinkle pattern is similar to that of the mouth in certain expressions, we see the mouth as neutral because the LBL, the lip shape, and the shape of the cheeks are all relaxed. At age twenty top , the mouth corner is marked by a short, oblique crease. The slight mound outside the...

When the entire orbicularis oculi muscle contracts, the eye is buried in a sea of wrinkles. Every feature is pulled toward the inner eye corner. An eye communicating sheer stress and distress is the result. Here the upper half of the muscle, rarely used, adds its action to that of the rest of the muscle. It creates the deep, ray-like wrinkles stretching between the eyes and triggers the pulling down of the eyebrows. We would only expect to see this face in...

The trickiest part of drawing the downward gaze is to not merely end up with a closed-looking eye. When the eyes simply close, the iris and pupil are covered in the process in the downward gaze, the eye leaves open a space large enough for the pupil to see through. This is accomplished by the bowing downward of the lower lid. A telltale crease, the signature fold for this action, appears below the lid as it moves. As the gaze drops further, the bow gets sharper and the crease deepens. The dip...

In drawing the smile, the challenge is visualizing the third dimension while working in only two. The smile-deepened nasolabial fold, for example, swings outward at 45 degrees A , but at the same time it's moving backward opposite page . The reason the teeth, chin, and upper lip begin to darken B is that that's where they're turning to the side, away from the light. In this schematic representation of the planes of the smile, the front portion of the smile is relatively flat the sides angle...

Only expressions in which both key areas eye brow and mouth are involved will communicate a clear emotional message. In the first face top only the mouth appears active, and the expression is ambiguous she might be yawning, taking a deep breath, singing, or pantomiming astonishment. The second face bottom , with activity in both key areas, is seen in just one way surprise. Not only do the active eyes complete the expression, but they change the way we look at the mouth. Cover the eyes and the...

The similarities among human heads are more striking than the differences. Artists have a name for the major type of similarity proportion. Proportional patterns in the head have been the subject of artists' attention since classical times. We use the skull as our guide because its landmarks are the most stable. The most consistent, and useful, proportional rule regarding the skull is the location of the halfway point. It almost always falls in the middle of the orbit, which on the face is the...

From side view, it's clear how the action of the depressor labii inferioris pulls the lip out from the face, exposing the lower teeth. MOUTH RELAXED CONTRACTION OF RISORIUS The lower lip in the relaxed open mouth looks thicker, but is not curled out from face. Only tips of the lower teeth are exposed. In risorius contraction, a full row of lower teeth are exposed, but the lips are stretched and the mouth widens. Depressor labii inferioris, by contrast exposes lower teeth down to the roots,...

Everyone's face is continually reshaped in response to different moods and impulses. Watch people in conversation their faces are rarely at rest. Their features respond as they listen and accompany their voices as they speak. The fact that we are capable of so much communication with our faces is a great help in our lives as social creatures. Those around us can share in our pleasure when they see us smile or be moved to cheer us up when they see we are sad. Our faces are as expressive as they...

His comprehensive visual index to the subtleties of emotion conveyed by facial expression is the only book of its kind. The Artists Complete Guide to Facial Expression carefully explains and illustrates the role of the muscles of expression and the effects of these muscles on the face. The images presented, from the author's own work and from photographic and artistic sources, focus on the action of muscles in three key areas of the face the forehead and brows, the eyes, and the mouth and chin....

Few forms are more suggestive of a particular emotion than the brow of grief is of sadness. The stretched mouth and clenched eye do not by themselves lend the face an unambiguous air of distress. The brow of grief does. The brow of grief is an action of restraint. In the most intense cry, the orbicularis oculi A is fully contracted, an action that triggers the corrugator B , the frowning muscle. When distress is less intense bottom , the pull downward on the brow is resisted by the middle...

When the zygomatic major contracts, the oval of the relaxed mouth is stretched into a more angular shape. The smile is the result of the pull of the muscle working against the resistance of the teeth. The teeth keep the smile flat in the middle A B lines mark where lips are pulled free of teeth and turn to point back toward the ears, in the direction of the pull. The upper lip is always straighter the pull is nearly at its height. The lower lip has farther to go, so it angles more. Note...

Opening the eye extra wide with the levator palpebrae acts to intensify many of the expressions. But even in an otherwise relaxed face, the contraction or relaxation of the levator can have a drastic effect. A. Excited. The eyelids are open as wide as possible. Most eyes will show a bit of white above the iris with the levator fully contracted. The lids arch more sharply, and the eye has a staring quality. B. Alert. These eyes are open somewhat wider than normal. The iris begins to be covered...

It has a well-developed central dip and a distinct break between peaks and legs. Note that the end of LBL is on same level as middle of LBL this is true unless the head is tipped. Not quite as straight as it looks. Really a flattened version of Cupid's bow dip and two peaks still present just barely. The three-part pattern of lips goes back to the development of the embryo and is present in every mouth. The arch shape is really another variation of the Cupid's bow, with...

If the mouth is neutral, it will not have LBL with abrupt changes in direction or extending well past end of lips. The ups and down of the LBL in the relaxed mouth are gradual. Only when pulled by muscle contraction will the LBL show a sudden break in direction A . The new direction may be up, as here, or down. Usually the same action will pull the LBL well beyond the visible end of the lips. Normally the LBL ends just beyond the end of the lips. An LBL end higher than its center is a...

With the passage of time, the more ephemeral wrinkles created by facial expressions become permanent. Although attempts have been made to decipher personality from the pattern that emerges, almost all the wrinkles here may be caused by either expressive, conversational, or even functional i.e., squinting in the sun use of the same muscles. A. Brow wrinkles. Horizontal folds owing to action of frontalis. B. Crow's feet. Lines radiating from corners of the eyes, owing to action of orbicularis...

His book might have remained nothing more than a passing idea had it not been for the initial encouragement of my erstwhile instructor and friend Robert Beverley Hale. In more recent times, Carl Rosen and Candace Raney of Watson-Guptill did more than perform their editing tasks with style and dispatch they communicated to the author an enthusiasm for the book no publishing contract can guarantee. Johanna Bartelt shouldered the marathon task of obtaining reproduction rights from museums and...

Most expressions are intensified when the mouth is opened the mouth is usually opened to add something to a response. The smile, when vocalization is added, becomes the laugh the frightened mouth opens to emit a scream the sad mouth utters a cry. Even the relaxed open mouth, depending on the look of the eye and brow, may suggest the face of astonishment or passion. A stroll through the department of primitive art in a large museum reveals that much of the work is in agreement with this...

The frontalis is the muscle underneath the forehead. Its basic action is simple it lifts the eyebrows straight upward, creating rows of wave-shaped wrinkles. The expressions of fear, surprise, and sadness all involve some degree of this brow lifting. But the fact that so many older people have these wrinkles has a more mundane explanation raising the eyebrows is the most common of all the conversational expressions. We raise our brows frequently and unconsciously to accompany our talk, with the...

Anger is a flash emotion, one that can arise and depart suddenly. It often requires a physical outlet, some action to serve as an energy release, even if it is just letting loose verbally. No other emotion is so closely tied to strong physical action, and no other emotion, in its extreme form, is so potentially dangerous. Surprisingly, for such a blatant, physical emotion, the look of anger in the face depends on a tiny detail the wideness of the eye. There is a direct, simple relationship...

As anyone who has ever picked up a pencil knows, the expression of the face is based on the corner of the eyes and the corners of the mouth. E. F. Gombrich, The Story of Art. The above statement is really more misleading than helpful. The corners of the mouth do change in most facial expressions, but so does the line between the lips, the shape of the lips, the cheeks, and the chin. None of these things change by themselves they're all connected. Taken together, a set of changes occur that we...

The frontalis is a sheet-like muscle running vertically down the forehead. There are two distinct halves, which join just above the nasal bones. The fixed end of the frontalis is right at the widow's peak, where it attaches to the thick fiber of the scalp. The free end attaches along a horizontal line at the level of the eyebrows. Some people have conscious control over just one half of the muscle, allowing them to raise one eyebrow. When we're distressed, only innermost fibers of muscle...

The levator labii superioris pulls the upper lip into a squared-off shape, the mouth of disgust. The sneering muscle pulls on the mouth indirectly None of its strands attaches to the lips themselves. Instead, it attaches to the circular muscle of the lips A , the nose wing, and the upper nasolabial fold B . The upward pull on the skin and muscle surrounding the lips drags the lips upward as well. There are three independent sections, which can all accomplish the same task The nasal branch is...

The corrugator is actually two separate muscles, the procerus and the corrugator. They always contract together. The fan-shaped procerus attaches to the bone at the base of the nose A , and to the skin at B between the eyebrows. The paired corrugators rise diagonally from their anchorage in the inner corner of the orbit C to their insertion in the skin above the middle of the eyebrow D . The corrugator pulls the brows down and together. It's active in most...

The attachments of orbicularis oculi. The orbicularis oculi, the muscle of the squint, has three parts, with separate functions. The inner, eyelid part, the palpebral portion A , runs crosswise through the lids and attaches at the eye corners, along with the lids B and C . The outer, orbital por tion has its fixed attachment on the skull D and its.free attachment into the skin of the cheek. It has a lower half E and an upper half F , which are semi-independent. Also pictured is levator...